Video transcript

- Hi, my name is Lou Hamou-Lhadj. I'm a Character TD here at Pixar. - Hi, I'm Jacob Speirs, I'm
also a Character TD at Pixar. - [Lou] We started here at
Pixar on WALL-E as interns and our task was to make a
huge cast of background robots. - Today's lesson is going
to be about how to create a huge crowd of robots using
only a few simple parts. (mechanical clicks) - I wanna take WALL-E from a world where there's no robots anymore and it's just him to a world
where there's tons of them. I just like that contrast
and suddenly making him feel like he was alone in a crowd. - We're trying to create a
world where robots do every task that you would want done. What we did first was
to look at cruise ships. We got a list of every
single job on a cruise ship and then went through
and tried to think of the robotic equivalent of that job and it became apparent quickly
that that was more robots than we would ever be able
to build in one lifetime. - So as interns, Jacob and I
had the task of making this huge cast of robots, but we
didn't want to design each individual one specifically. - Right, so luckily there
was an animator, Angus, and he had a great idea about
how to approach the process. - I'm a huge Lego fan and I really wanted the background characters
to be the best they could be and I figured if we
designed a modular system that would allow for us to add
and subtract different parts onto the character for
the background characters then we could kinda
make whatever we needed and it would all feel like the same world. - [Lou] Doing it this way, modularly, meant we could build 10
heads, 10 arms, and 10 bodies and though we'd only built 30 pieces we could make a thousand
different combinations. - Yeah, and there's actually
a branch of mathematics about that sort of thing,
counting and combinations and it's called combinatorics. (mechanical noises) - Combinatorics is actually
what your lesson today is gonna be about. We're gonna start with a few small pieces and build a huge cast of
robots just like we did.